Club Champion vs. TrueSpec vs. Edel -- Long Post

[Clemente80]

Over the last year, I've become a daily reader of these forums and appreciate all the advice about the value of getting properly fit. I live about 10 min from Club Champion in Willowbrook, IL and planned to do a fitting for new irons there. But then I read a post on Pluggedingolf.com about TrueSpec, and since I really wanted to be certain about what to buy, I thought I'd do both. Finally, I love my Edel wedges and putter, I've always been great with short irons and ok with longer clubs. So the idea of a shorter iron was intriguing, and I know that Matt Jones from Edel truly knows his stuff when it comes to fitting. So needless to say, I wanted to do an Edel SLS fitting too.

 

As background, the reason I wanted to do so many fittings is that my last iron set purchase was a disaster. From 2004 - 2010, I played the Mizuno MP-32s with DG S300 -- hands down the best clubs I've ever played and I played the best with them. In 2010, I moved to Chicago and did a TaylorMade fitting at Olympia Fields. I ended up with the R9 TP irons with KBS Tour Regular. I was skeptical about going to a regular shaft, but I trusted the fitter. Basically, I've hated the irons ever since I got them. My final round with the MP-32s was a 78, but I haven't broken 80 in the 8 years since. Within a year, I reshafted with DG S300, and it was better but still the performance was nothing like the MP-32s - I just never had the accuracy that I want. You'd be right if you say that I should have gotten new irons years ago, but I got married, bought a house, had kids...golf just wasn't a high priority. But now I'm getting back into it and decided I was going to get new irons or use the MP-32s. And based on my experience with the R9 TPs, feel and dispersion were important, distance was not.

 

With all that as context, I scheduled my fittings. Many of you are familiar with how Club Champion works, but I'll give a short recap. They find a modern club head similar to what you're playing (for me, this was the JPX 900 Forged), then you try different shafts to see what gives you the best numbers. Once you find the best shaft, they swap out heads until you get the best overall numbers. Seems like a reasonable approach, and after testing they said the NS Pro 1050 was the best for me. Then it was time to switch to the head-swapping phase. Unfortunately, it was January and hadn't built up any golf endurance yet so I lost my swing at this point. Still, I'm passing along some notes on the clubs I tried: the Titleist CB and AP2 didn't feel good to me and I seemed to lose distance. The Apex has a very harsh, modern feel. I think I tried a few others but I forget which ones. Eventually we went back to the 900F and I started hitting well again, so they recommended 900F with the NS Pro 1050. I told them I wanted to try the MP-18 SC and MMC, since I love my MP-32s. I started with the MMC and liked it. The MP-18 SC felt like a better version of the MP-32 with incredible feel, but it was noticeably not as forgiving, and I'm not as good (or as young) as I used to be, so the MMC or 900F seemed like a better fit. It was a little disappointing that I found the MMC on my own, so I kept going back and forth between the 900F and MMC. The Club Champion guys couldn't seem to recommend one or the other either. For me, the MMC had better feel, so I was leaning that way, and they realized it too so they ultimately recommended the MMC, although they said I'd be fine with either the MMC or the 900F (both with the NS Pro 1050).

 

Later that week I went to TrueSpec. Right before the fitting, I took a lesson with Rick Silva at Movement 3 Golf, which is in the same studio as TrueSpec. It was actually a great lesson and Rick quickly diagnosed a few issues I had been concerned about (club path too far inside and closed face). Then I did the TrueSpec fitting and it was radically different than Club Champion. They asked me a lot more about my game, where my misses were (left, always left), what I was looking for (limited dispersion, feel, don't care about distance). Then they only gave me 3 heads - MMC, X-Forged and a Miura. The Miura was nice on pure shots but probably required more game than I have. The X-Forged was nice, better than I was expecting. But the fitter said the MMC produced better numbers. They tried out different shafts, including a variety of Nippon Modus, and it came down to the Oban CT-115 and the NS Pro 950. I mentioned to them that I tried the NS Pro 1050 at Club Champion, but I don't think they had it. Ultimately, they recommended the MMC with the Oban.

 

The big difference between Club Champion and TrueSpec is in their approach. Club Champion is more like a science - it seems to be more numbers-driven and not at all subjective. TrueSpec is art and science. They explicitly believe that spin is more of a function of club head than shaft. This didn't matter too much to me, because both fittings said that the MMC was the right club head for me. So its not really that Club Champion or TrueSpec is better overall, they're just different. The issue was really the shaft. I could have ordered the MMC with the NS Pro 950 from Mizuno with no up-charge, but if I wanted the 1050 or the Oban, I had to pony up the money from either Club Champion or TrueSpec. I wanted to see if I could save money, so I read other posts about what shafts are similar to the NS Pro 1050 and the Obans. But finally I decided that since I was going through this process, I was going to follow one of their recommendations. What ended up being the deciding factor is that Rick Silva finished his other lesson and participated in the latter half of my fitting and explained that certain properties of the Oban would be better for me. It was just too hard to disregard a top teaching pro's advice, right after he gave me a lesson. So I decided that if I was going to get the Mizunos (6-PW only), it would be with the Oban CT-115 through TrueSpec.

 

All that remained was my fitting with Matt Jones from Edel. I've done a wedge and putter fitting so I knew that Matt just hands you clubs and you're supposed to hit them without looking. After seeing the results with my current Edel clubs, I trust what he says. Eventually, he fit me into a 5-PW at 37 inches. I'm 6'3", and my MP-32s are 1" longer, so 37" was between an 8 and 9 iron for me. I've always wanted 6 iron that was the length of a short iron, so Matt's recommendation was exactly what I was looking for. For what its worth, the 5-6 have a long-iron profile, the 7-8 have a mid-iron profile, and the 9-PW have a short-iron profile. The iron profiles relate to the flex, kickpoint and other properties that are better suited for an Edel rep to explain.

 

There are very few reviews of the Edel SLS, so let me be clear -- you will be surprised the performance. As a final test, I hit three balls with the Edel 6 iron and three with my MP-32 6 iron. The Edel was flat out easier to hit, I hit it about 6 yards further, with less dispersion, slower swing speed, higher smash, same height and spin rates. It was pretty obvious that the Edel was better than my current set.

 

So it all came down to the MMCs with Oban-CT 115 or the Edel SLS. The MMC seemed like the no risk choice - a more modern version of irons that I know well. Everything I read about Mizuno online is consistent with what I've experienced myself. Very little downside, maybe not huge upside. With Edel, its the opposite. The ceiling is probably higher if I can groove one swing instead of 5 different iron swings. But the issue is the downside - there's not much info out there on the Edel SLS. If I just based the decision on pure numbers, then Edel would have been the winner. But the bottom line is that after struggling so much the past several years, I decided I couldn't take a risk on being wrong. So I finally decided to go with the MMC. I still think a lot about the Edel SLS - they're simply much easier to hit than any other clubs out there - and I may get them down the road when my game has gotten back to the level where I want to be. But for now, I'm going with the MMCs. Let's hope they perform as well as they look. I have a winter golf trip in a couple weeks and will post a review of the MMCs when I return.

 

Sorry for the long post, but GolfWRX has been so helpful to me over the past year that I wanted to give back to the community. Hopefully someone finds this helpful.

[halfsumo]

Great first post! Might have to take a look at those Obans.

[RodC]

Thank you

 

What is your HCP Index?

[OsnolaKinnard]

Over the last year, I've become a daily reader of these forums and appreciate all the advice about the value of getting properly fit. I live about 10 min from Club Champion in Willowbrook, IL and planned to do a fitting for new irons there. But then I read a post on Pluggedingolf.com about TrueSpec, and since I really wanted to be certain about what to buy, I thought I'd do both. Finally, I love my Edel wedges and putter, I've always been great with short irons and ok with longer clubs. So the idea of a shorter iron was intriguing, and I know that Matt Jones from Edel truly knows his stuff when it comes to fitting. So needless to say, I wanted to do an Edel SLS fitting too.

 

As background, the reason I wanted to do so many fittings is that my last iron set purchase was a disaster. From 2004 - 2010, I played the Mizuno MP-32s with DG S300 -- hands down the best clubs I've ever played and I played the best with them. In 2010, I moved to Chicago and did a TaylorMade fitting at Olympia Fields. I ended up with the R9 TP irons with KBS Tour Regular. I was skeptical about going to a regular shaft, but I trusted the fitter. Basically, I've hated the irons ever since I got them. My final round with the MP-32s was a 78, but I haven't broken 80 in the 8 years since. Within a year, I reshafted with DG S300, and it was better but still the performance was nothing like the MP-32s - I just never had the accuracy that I want. You'd be right if you say that I should have gotten new irons years ago, but I got married, bought a house, had kids...golf just wasn't a high priority. But now I'm getting back into it and decided I was going to get new irons or use the MP-32s. And based on my experience with the R9 TPs, feel and dispersion were important, distance was not.

 

With all that as context, I scheduled my fittings. Many of you are familiar with how Club Champion works, but I'll give a short recap. They find a modern club head similar to what you're playing (for me, this was the JPX 900 Forged), then you try different shafts to see what gives you the best numbers. Once you find the best shaft, they swap out heads until you get the best overall numbers. Seems like a reasonable approach, and after testing they said the NS Pro 1050 was the best for me. Then it was time to switch to the head-swapping phase. Unfortunately, it was January and hadn't built up any golf endurance yet so I lost my swing at this point. Still, I'm passing along some notes on the clubs I tried: the Titleist CB and AP2 didn't feel good to me and I seemed to lose distance. The Apex has a very harsh, modern feel. I think I tried a few others but I forget which ones. Eventually we went back to the 900F and I started hitting well again, so they recommended 900F with the NS Pro 1050. I told them I wanted to try the MP-18 SC and MMC, since I love my MP-32s. I started with the MMC and liked it. The MP-18 SC felt like a better version of the MP-32 with incredible feel, but it was noticeably not as forgiving, and I'm not as good (or as young) as I used to be, so the MMC or 900F seemed like a better fit. It was a little disappointing that I found the MMC on my own, so I kept going back and forth between the 900F and MMC. The Club Champion guys couldn't seem to recommend one or the other either. For me, the MMC had better feel, so I was leaning that way, and they realized it too so they ultimately recommended the MMC, although they said I'd be fine with either the MMC or the 900F (both with the NS Pro 1050).

 

Later that week I went to TrueSpec. Right before the fitting, I took a lesson with Rick Silva at Movement 3 Golf, which is in the same studio as TrueSpec. It was actually a great lesson and Rick quickly diagnosed a few issues I had been concerned about (club path too far inside and closed face). Then I did the TrueSpec fitting and it was radically different than Club Champion. They asked me a lot more about my game, where my misses were (left, always left), what I was looking for (limited dispersion, feel, don't care about distance). Then they only gave me 3 heads - MMC, X-Forged and a Miura. The Miura was nice on pure shots but probably required more game than I have. The X-Forged was nice, better than I was expecting. But the fitter said the MMC produced better numbers. They tried out different shafts, including a variety of Nippon Modus, and it came down to the Oban CT-115 and the NS Pro 950. I mentioned to them that I tried the NS Pro 1050 at Club Champion, but I don't think they had it. Ultimately, they recommended the MMC with the Oban.

 

The big difference between Club Champion and TrueSpec is in their approach. Club Champion is more like a science - it seems to be more numbers-driven and not at all subjective. TrueSpec is art and science. They explicitly believe that spin is more of a function of club head than shaft. This didn't matter too much to me, because both fittings said that the MMC was the right club head for me. So its not really that Club Champion or TrueSpec is better overall, they're just different. The issue was really the shaft. I could have ordered the MMC with the NS Pro 950 from Mizuno with no up-charge, but if I wanted the 1050 or the Oban, I had to pony up the money from either Club Champion or TrueSpec. I wanted to see if I could save money, so I read other posts about what shafts are similar to the NS Pro 1050 and the Obans. But finally I decided that since I was going through this process, I was going to follow one of their recommendations. What ended up being the deciding factor is that Rick Silva finished his other lesson and participated in the latter half of my fitting and explained that certain properties of the Oban would be better for me. It was just too hard to disregard a top teaching pro's advice, right after he gave me a lesson. So I decided that if I was going to get the Mizunos (6-PW only), it would be with the Oban CT-115 through TrueSpec.

 

All that remained was my fitting with Matt Jones from Edel. I've done a wedge and putter fitting so I knew that Matt just hands you clubs and you're supposed to hit them without looking. After seeing the results with my current Edel clubs, I trust what he says. Eventually, he fit me into a 5-PW at 37 inches. I'm 6'3", and my MP-32s are 1" longer, so 37" was between an 8 and 9 iron for me. I've always wanted 6 iron that was the length of a short iron, so Matt's recommendation was exactly what I was looking for. For what its worth, the 5-6 have a long-iron profile, the 7-8 have a mid-iron profile, and the 9-PW have a short-iron profile. The iron profiles relate to the flex, kickpoint and other properties that are better suited for an Edel rep to explain.

 

There are very few reviews of the Edel SLS, so let me be clear -- you will be surprised the performance. As a final test, I hit three balls with the Edel 6 iron and three with my MP-32 6 iron. The Edel was flat out easier to hit, I hit it about 6 yards further, with less dispersion, slower swing speed, higher smash, same height and spin rates. It was pretty obvious that the Edel was better than my current set.

 

So it all came down to the MMCs with Oban-CT 115 or the Edel SLS. The MMC seemed like the no risk choice - a more modern version of irons that I know well. Everything I read about Mizuno online is consistent with what I've experienced myself. Very little downside, maybe not huge upside. With Edel, its the opposite. The ceiling is probably higher if I can groove one swing instead of 5 different iron swings. But the issue is the downside - there's not much info out there on the Edel SLS. If I just based the decision on pure numbers, then Edel would have been the winner. But the bottom line is that after struggling so much the past several years, I decided I couldn't take a risk on being wrong. So I finally decided to go with the MMC. I still think a lot about the Edel SLS - they're simply much easier to hit than any other clubs out there - and I may get them down the road when my game has gotten back to the level where I want to be. But for now, I'm going with the MMCs. Let's hope they perform as well as they look. I have a winter golf trip in a couple weeks and will post a review of the MMCs when I return.

 

Sorry for the long post, but GolfWRX has been so helpful to me over the past year that I wanted to give back to the community. Hopefully someone finds this helpful.

 

I got fitted for the Edel SLS01's in November, right before Thanksgiving. I am ordering mine on Valentine's Day. What you described during the Edel Fitting experience is an exact replication of my own experience. How you described hitting the irons is also an exact replication of my experience. What I loved the most about the Edel SLS-01's is that they have a very compact, virtually no offset. head, that has game improvement features. It's like having a Super Game Improvement club, that will do anything you want it to do. FYI...my specs for the Edel Irons are 37.5", 64* Lie angle (2 up), 274 gram head, Long Iron Profile in the 5-7 irons, Mid Iron in the 8-9, and Short Iron in the PW and GW...95 gram Stiff flex shaft.

 

One last thing...When I have been fitted for clubs in the past, I have found that the set up with the 'best numbers' does not always transfer to the course. I love the 'science' part, but the artistic part of being fit to my swing/game is where it's at for me.

 

My driver may not have the 'optimum launch/spin rate', but I keep that thing in play, and that's worth much more than a 'perfect spec' in my book.

[apprenti23]

What was the shaft weight that they fit you into at Edel? I

[C Bird]

Thanks for posting this.

[mason82]

Just got fit at CC, and the Obans were the clear winner. Grimaced at the price, but like you, I went there with the intent to do,what they suggested.

[Clemente80]

Thank you

 

What is your HCP Index?

I'm a 10-12. Better than my HCP with irons, worse with the driver, and ok with the short game.

[Clemente80]

What was the shaft weight that they fit you into at Edel? I

110g with 6 gram weights in the heads.

[Clemente80]

Over the last year, I've become a daily reader of these forums and appreciate all the advice about the value of getting properly fit. I live about 10 min from Club Champion in Willowbrook, IL and planned to do a fitting for new irons there. But then I read a post on Pluggedingolf.com about TrueSpec, and since I really wanted to be certain about what to buy, I thought I'd do both. Finally, I love my Edel wedges and putter, I've always been great with short irons and ok with longer clubs. So the idea of a shorter iron was intriguing, and I know that Matt Jones from Edel truly knows his stuff when it comes to fitting. So needless to say, I wanted to do an Edel SLS fitting too.

 

As background, the reason I wanted to do so many fittings is that my last iron set purchase was a disaster. From 2004 - 2010, I played the Mizuno MP-32s with DG S300 -- hands down the best clubs I've ever played and I played the best with them. In 2010, I moved to Chicago and did a TaylorMade fitting at Olympia Fields. I ended up with the R9 TP irons with KBS Tour Regular. I was skeptical about going to a regular shaft, but I trusted the fitter. Basically, I've hated the irons ever since I got them. My final round with the MP-32s was a 78, but I haven't broken 80 in the 8 years since. Within a year, I reshafted with DG S300, and it was better but still the performance was nothing like the MP-32s - I just never had the accuracy that I want. You'd be right if you say that I should have gotten new irons years ago, but I got married, bought a house, had kids...golf just wasn't a high priority. But now I'm getting back into it and decided I was going to get new irons or use the MP-32s. And based on my experience with the R9 TPs, feel and dispersion were important, distance was not.

 

With all that as context, I scheduled my fittings. Many of you are familiar with how Club Champion works, but I'll give a short recap. They find a modern club head similar to what you're playing (for me, this was the JPX 900 Forged), then you try different shafts to see what gives you the best numbers. Once you find the best shaft, they swap out heads until you get the best overall numbers. Seems like a reasonable approach, and after testing they said the NS Pro 1050 was the best for me. Then it was time to switch to the head-swapping phase. Unfortunately, it was January and hadn't built up any golf endurance yet so I lost my swing at this point. Still, I'm passing along some notes on the clubs I tried: the Titleist CB and AP2 didn't feel good to me and I seemed to lose distance. The Apex has a very harsh, modern feel. I think I tried a few others but I forget which ones. Eventually we went back to the 900F and I started hitting well again, so they recommended 900F with the NS Pro 1050. I told them I wanted to try the MP-18 SC and MMC, since I love my MP-32s. I started with the MMC and liked it. The MP-18 SC felt like a better version of the MP-32 with incredible feel, but it was noticeably not as forgiving, and I'm not as good (or as young) as I used to be, so the MMC or 900F seemed like a better fit. It was a little disappointing that I found the MMC on my own, so I kept going back and forth between the 900F and MMC. The Club Champion guys couldn't seem to recommend one or the other either. For me, the MMC had better feel, so I was leaning that way, and they realized it too so they ultimately recommended the MMC, although they said I'd be fine with either the MMC or the 900F (both with the NS Pro 1050).

 

Later that week I went to TrueSpec. Right before the fitting, I took a lesson with Rick Silva at Movement 3 Golf, which is in the same studio as TrueSpec. It was actually a great lesson and Rick quickly diagnosed a few issues I had been concerned about (club path too far inside and closed face). Then I did the TrueSpec fitting and it was radically different than Club Champion. They asked me a lot more about my game, where my misses were (left, always left), what I was looking for (limited dispersion, feel, don't care about distance). Then they only gave me 3 heads - MMC, X-Forged and a Miura. The Miura was nice on pure shots but probably required more game than I have. The X-Forged was nice, better than I was expecting. But the fitter said the MMC produced better numbers. They tried out different shafts, including a variety of Nippon Modus, and it came down to the Oban CT-115 and the NS Pro 950. I mentioned to them that I tried the NS Pro 1050 at Club Champion, but I don't think they had it. Ultimately, they recommended the MMC with the Oban.

 

The big difference between Club Champion and TrueSpec is in their approach. Club Champion is more like a science - it seems to be more numbers-driven and not at all subjective. TrueSpec is art and science. They explicitly believe that spin is more of a function of club head than shaft. This didn't matter too much to me, because both fittings said that the MMC was the right club head for me. So its not really that Club Champion or TrueSpec is better overall, they're just different. The issue was really the shaft. I could have ordered the MMC with the NS Pro 950 from Mizuno with no up-charge, but if I wanted the 1050 or the Oban, I had to pony up the money from either Club Champion or TrueSpec. I wanted to see if I could save money, so I read other posts about what shafts are similar to the NS Pro 1050 and the Obans. But finally I decided that since I was going through this process, I was going to follow one of their recommendations. What ended up being the deciding factor is that Rick Silva finished his other lesson and participated in the latter half of my fitting and explained that certain properties of the Oban would be better for me. It was just too hard to disregard a top teaching pro's advice, right after he gave me a lesson. So I decided that if I was going to get the Mizunos (6-PW only), it would be with the Oban CT-115 through TrueSpec.

 

All that remained was my fitting with Matt Jones from Edel. I've done a wedge and putter fitting so I knew that Matt just hands you clubs and you're supposed to hit them without looking. After seeing the results with my current Edel clubs, I trust what he says. Eventually, he fit me into a 5-PW at 37 inches. I'm 6'3", and my MP-32s are 1" longer, so 37" was between an 8 and 9 iron for me. I've always wanted 6 iron that was the length of a short iron, so Matt's recommendation was exactly what I was looking for. For what its worth, the 5-6 have a long-iron profile, the 7-8 have a mid-iron profile, and the 9-PW have a short-iron profile. The iron profiles relate to the flex, kickpoint and other properties that are better suited for an Edel rep to explain.

 

There are very few reviews of the Edel SLS, so let me be clear -- you will be surprised the performance. As a final test, I hit three balls with the Edel 6 iron and three with my MP-32 6 iron. The Edel was flat out easier to hit, I hit it about 6 yards further, with less dispersion, slower swing speed, higher smash, same height and spin rates. It was pretty obvious that the Edel was better than my current set.

 

So it all came down to the MMCs with Oban-CT 115 or the Edel SLS. The MMC seemed like the no risk choice - a more modern version of irons that I know well. Everything I read about Mizuno online is consistent with what I've experienced myself. Very little downside, maybe not huge upside. With Edel, its the opposite. The ceiling is probably higher if I can groove one swing instead of 5 different iron swings. But the issue is the downside - there's not much info out there on the Edel SLS. If I just based the decision on pure numbers, then Edel would have been the winner. But the bottom line is that after struggling so much the past several years, I decided I couldn't take a risk on being wrong. So I finally decided to go with the MMC. I still think a lot about the Edel SLS - they're simply much easier to hit than any other clubs out there - and I may get them down the road when my game has gotten back to the level where I want to be. But for now, I'm going with the MMCs. Let's hope they perform as well as they look. I have a winter golf trip in a couple weeks and will post a review of the MMCs when I return.

 

Sorry for the long post, but GolfWRX has been so helpful to me over the past year that I wanted to give back to the community. Hopefully someone finds this helpful.

 

I got fitted for the Edel SLS01's in November, right before Thanksgiving. I am ordering mine on Valentine's Day. What you described during the Edel Fitting experience is an exact replication of my own experience. How you described hitting the irons is also an exact replication of my experience. What I loved the most about the Edel SLS-01's is that they have a very compact, virtually no offset. head, that has game improvement features. It's like having a Super Game Improvement club, that will do anything you want it to do. FYI...my specs for the Edel Irons are 37.5", 64* Lie angle (2 up), 274 gram head, Long Iron Profile in the 5-7 irons, Mid Iron in the 8-9, and Short Iron in the PW and GW...95 gram Stiff flex shaft.

 

One last thing...When I have been fitted for clubs in the past, I have found that the set up with the 'best numbers' does not always transfer to the course. I love the 'science' part, but the artistic part of being fit to my swing/game is where it's at for me.

 

My driver may not have the 'optimum launch/spin rate', but I keep that thing in play, and that's worth much more than a 'perfect spec' in my book.

Your description of the Edels is exactly what I thought too - they definitely have a thicker topline, but somehow the shape and lack of offset make it work. Definitely not chunky like a lot of GI or SGI irons. Congrats on your upcoming purchase, let me know how you end up hitting your Edels. I think more people (including myself) need to know how they perform.

[apprenti23]

He didn’t get the edels though? Right?

 

Sounds like OP went through the process and second guessed himself the whole time and may still be doing so...

 

Really don’t understand why you didn’t get the edels op?

[Clemente80]

He didn't get the edels though? Right?

 

Sounds like OP went through the process and second guessed himself the whole time and may still be doing so...

 

Really don't understand why you didn't get the edels op?

I did not get the Edels, I got the MMCs. The reasons are confidence and risk aversion. The MMCs are a solid A, the Edels might be an A+, or they might be a B+ or A-. I didn't want any more uncertainty about my irons.

[Green Valley]

Over the last year, I've become a daily reader of these forums and appreciate all the advice about the value of getting properly fit. I live about 10 min from Club Champion in Willowbrook, IL and planned to do a fitting for new irons there. But then I read a post on Pluggedingolf.com about TrueSpec, and since I really wanted to be certain about what to buy, I thought I'd do both. Finally, I love my Edel wedges and putter, I've always been great with short irons and ok with longer clubs. So the idea of a shorter iron was intriguing, and I know that Matt Jones from Edel truly knows his stuff when it comes to fitting. So needless to say, I wanted to do an Edel SLS fitting too.

 

As background, the reason I wanted to do so many fittings is that my last iron set purchase was a disaster. From 2004 - 2010, I played the Mizuno MP-32s with DG S300 -- hands down the best clubs I've ever played and I played the best with them. In 2010, I moved to Chicago and did a TaylorMade fitting at Olympia Fields. I ended up with the R9 TP irons with KBS Tour Regular. I was skeptical about going to a regular shaft, but I trusted the fitter. Basically, I've hated the irons ever since I got them. My final round with the MP-32s was a 78, but I haven't broken 80 in the 8 years since. Within a year, I reshafted with DG S300, and it was better but still the performance was nothing like the MP-32s - I just never had the accuracy that I want. You'd be right if you say that I should have gotten new irons years ago, but I got married, bought a house, had kids...golf just wasn't a high priority. But now I'm getting back into it and decided I was going to get new irons or use the MP-32s. And based on my experience with the R9 TPs, feel and dispersion were important, distance was not.

 

With all that as context, I scheduled my fittings. Many of you are familiar with how Club Champion works, but I'll give a short recap. They find a modern club head similar to what you're playing (for me, this was the JPX 900 Forged), then you try different shafts to see what gives you the best numbers. Once you find the best shaft, they swap out heads until you get the best overall numbers. Seems like a reasonable approach, and after testing they said the NS Pro 1050 was the best for me. Then it was time to switch to the head-swapping phase. Unfortunately, it was January and hadn't built up any golf endurance yet so I lost my swing at this point. Still, I'm passing along some notes on the clubs I tried: the Titleist CB and AP2 didn't feel good to me and I seemed to lose distance. The Apex has a very harsh, modern feel. I think I tried a few others but I forget which ones. Eventually we went back to the 900F and I started hitting well again, so they recommended 900F with the NS Pro 1050. I told them I wanted to try the MP-18 SC and MMC, since I love my MP-32s. I started with the MMC and liked it. The MP-18 SC felt like a better version of the MP-32 with incredible feel, but it was noticeably not as forgiving, and I'm not as good (or as young) as I used to be, so the MMC or 900F seemed like a better fit. It was a little disappointing that I found the MMC on my own, so I kept going back and forth between the 900F and MMC. The Club Champion guys couldn't seem to recommend one or the other either. For me, the MMC had better feel, so I was leaning that way, and they realized it too so they ultimately recommended the MMC, although they said I'd be fine with either the MMC or the 900F (both with the NS Pro 1050).

 

Later that week I went to TrueSpec. Right before the fitting, I took a lesson with Rick Silva at Movement 3 Golf, which is in the same studio as TrueSpec. It was actually a great lesson and Rick quickly diagnosed a few issues I had been concerned about (club path too far inside and closed face). Then I did the TrueSpec fitting and it was radically different than Club Champion. They asked me a lot more about my game, where my misses were (left, always left), what I was looking for (limited dispersion, feel, don't care about distance). Then they only gave me 3 heads - MMC, X-Forged and a Miura. The Miura was nice on pure shots but probably required more game than I have. The X-Forged was nice, better than I was expecting. But the fitter said the MMC produced better numbers. They tried out different shafts, including a variety of Nippon Modus, and it came down to the Oban CT-115 and the NS Pro 950. I mentioned to them that I tried the NS Pro 1050 at Club Champion, but I don't think they had it. Ultimately, they recommended the MMC with the Oban.

 

The big difference between Club Champion and TrueSpec is in their approach. Club Champion is more like a science - it seems to be more numbers-driven and not at all subjective. TrueSpec is art and science. They explicitly believe that spin is more of a function of club head than shaft. This didn't matter too much to me, because both fittings said that the MMC was the right club head for me. So its not really that Club Champion or TrueSpec is better overall, they're just different. The issue was really the shaft. I could have ordered the MMC with the NS Pro 950 from Mizuno with no up-charge, but if I wanted the 1050 or the Oban, I had to pony up the money from either Club Champion or TrueSpec. I wanted to see if I could save money, so I read other posts about what shafts are similar to the NS Pro 1050 and the Obans. But finally I decided that since I was going through this process, I was going to follow one of their recommendations. What ended up being the deciding factor is that Rick Silva finished his other lesson and participated in the latter half of my fitting and explained that certain properties of the Oban would be better for me. It was just too hard to disregard a top teaching pro's advice, right after he gave me a lesson. So I decided that if I was going to get the Mizunos (6-PW only), it would be with the Oban CT-115 through TrueSpec.

 

All that remained was my fitting with Matt Jones from Edel. I've done a wedge and putter fitting so I knew that Matt just hands you clubs and you're supposed to hit them without looking. After seeing the results with my current Edel clubs, I trust what he says. Eventually, he fit me into a 5-PW at 37 inches. I'm 6'3", and my MP-32s are 1" longer, so 37" was between an 8 and 9 iron for me. I've always wanted 6 iron that was the length of a short iron, so Matt's recommendation was exactly what I was looking for. For what its worth, the 5-6 have a long-iron profile, the 7-8 have a mid-iron profile, and the 9-PW have a short-iron profile. The iron profiles relate to the flex, kickpoint and other properties that are better suited for an Edel rep to explain.

 

There are very few reviews of the Edel SLS, so let me be clear -- you will be surprised the performance. As a final test, I hit three balls with the Edel 6 iron and three with my MP-32 6 iron. The Edel was flat out easier to hit, I hit it about 6 yards further, with less dispersion, slower swing speed, higher smash, same height and spin rates. It was pretty obvious that the Edel was better than my current set.

 

So it all came down to the MMCs with Oban-CT 115 or the Edel SLS. The MMC seemed like the no risk choice - a more modern version of irons that I know well. Everything I read about Mizuno online is consistent with what I've experienced myself. Very little downside, maybe not huge upside. With Edel, its the opposite. The ceiling is probably higher if I can groove one swing instead of 5 different iron swings. But the issue is the downside - there's not much info out there on the Edel SLS. If I just based the decision on pure numbers, then Edel would have been the winner. But the bottom line is that after struggling so much the past several years, I decided I couldn't take a risk on being wrong. So I finally decided to go with the MMC. I still think a lot about the Edel SLS - they're simply much easier to hit than any other clubs out there - and I may get them down the road when my game has gotten back to the level where I want to be. But for now, I'm going with the MMCs. Let's hope they perform as well as they look. I have a winter golf trip in a couple weeks and will post a review of the MMCs when I return.

 

Sorry for the long post, but GolfWRX has been so helpful to me over the past year that I wanted to give back to the community. Hopefully someone finds this helpful.

 

Did you ever think of going to cool clubs? I live in Chicago as well and am deciding about cool clubs and recently heard about tour spec.

 

Thanks for the insight

 

[trumb1mj1]

Great post! What spin numbers were your fitters seeking in the 6i?

[Clemente80]

Just got fit at CC, and the Obans were the clear winner. Grimaced at the price, but like you, I went there with the intent to do,what they suggested.

Good to know someone else out there has them. Hopefully they work out for you. There aren't a ton of reviews, so I'd love to know what you think once you start playing with them.

[Clemente80]

 

 

Did you ever think of going to cool clubs? I live in Chicago as well and am deciding about cool clubs and recently heard about tour spec.

 

Thanks for the insight

I did think about going to Cool Clubs, but mostly because I was interested in doing an outdoor fitting. I wanted to do a fitting with them around Christmas when I was visiting family in Arizona, but I injured my hand around Thanksgiving and couldn't swing a golf club at Christmas. Club Champion is close to me, and since I was already going to Movement3 for a lesson and TrueSpec is at the same place, going to TrueSpec made more sense for me thangoing to Cool Clubs. Saving a trip is important - there's only so many times I can tell my wife I'm doing a club fitting.

 

But one thing I wanted to clarify - Club Champion and TrueSpec are both very good and I would highly recommend both of them. I really liked talking to Kyle Morris at Club Champion and they stayed open past closing time to give me more time to figure things out. TrueSpec went well beyond the fitting time as well. At both places I was recommended the same club head. The shafts I was fit for were 105g and 115g, respectively, and even Edel fit me into a 110g shaft. So I don't think that you'll that go wrong with either Club Champion or TrueSpec, and I imagine that the same is true of Cool Clubs or Hot Stix.

[JiuJitsuandGolf]

I too, were fitted with the Oban CT-115, but decided not to pull the trigger. Good Luck with the new equipment!

[swgolf12]

I wanted to read this but you lost me at the right before my 2nd fitting I got a lesson. You should be hitting it well when you get fit, a lesson mid fittings throws all results off.

[Green Valley]

Did you ever think of going to cool clubs? I live in Chicago as well and am deciding about cool clubs and recently heard about tour spec.

 

Thanks for the insight

I did think about going to Cool Clubs, but mostly because I was interested in doing an outdoor fitting. I wanted to do a fitting with them around Christmas when I was visiting family in Arizona, but I injured my hand around Thanksgiving and couldn't swing a golf club at Christmas. Club Champion is close to me, and since I was already going to Movement3 for a lesson and TrueSpec is at the same place, going to TrueSpec made more sense for me thangoing to Cool Clubs. Saving a trip is important - there's only so many times I can tell my wife I'm doing a club fitting.

 

But one thing I wanted to clarify - Club Champion and TrueSpec are both very good and I would highly recommend both of them. I really liked talking to Kyle Morris at Club Champion and they stayed open past closing time to give me more time to figure things out. TrueSpec went well beyond the fitting time as well. At both places I was recommended the same club head. The shafts I was fit for were 105g and 115g, respectively, and even Edel fit me into a 110g shaft. So I don't think that you'll that go wrong with either Club Champion or TrueSpec, and I imagine that the same is true of Cool Clubs or Hot Stix.

 

Thanks for the input. I also went to club champion a few times.

 

I was actually thinking about going to cool clubs but i literally just heard of True Spec through Instagram and this post. So now I have to decide which one to go to.

[Rezzy]

Thanks for the write up! These posts really helped me decide my course of action in getting new irons. I recently went for a full bag fitting at Club Champion, ordering irons. I haven't gotten them yet, but plan posting when I've played with them. That's the one thing that seems to be missing from many fitting reviews, the actual results when you get the clubs.

[2Tall4Golf]

@Green Valley - My recommendation would be to skip Cool Clubs and either go to Club Chanpion or True Spec. I did a fitting with True Spec back in December and personally it was the best fitting experience I’ve had. Cool Clubs is overpriced for what they offer. Everything is based on some spreadsheet they put together in terms of what shafts to try. As the OP mentioned both Club Champion and True Spec add some art to the science. I put a review of True Spec in the Midwest course forum.

[JCAG]

I get nervous with any fitting system that offers only one head, especially single length. Not knocking single length but the Edel Single Length is much different then what the other fitters were offering.